Could I anticipate the rest of what Dan Brown might cover? Maybe, but it would take a lot of digging. I would have to pursue leads and links wherever they might lead.
That one “widow’s son” clue blossomed into hundreds more, because it led me to investigate the vast world of Freemasonry, from its beginnings in stonemasons’ guilds and the Scottish lodges, into England and Europe, and finally to the United States.
But opening the doors to Freemasonry is also an invitation to explore dozens of other related topics, such as legends of Pythagoreans and Egyptians, and the building of the Temple of Solomon, among allegories that the Masons adopted. (In fact, for about two or three years, Dan Brown’s publishers had said the title of his next novel would be The Solomon Key. So every conceivable meaning of “Solomon key” needed investigation—and there were many.)
My early work in the first few months of trying to see if I could figure out where Dan Brown was going took me deep into Internet searches that yielded more than seven hundred articles that seemed germane. I followed one path, pursuing the “art of memory,” connecting Cicero with Giordano Bruno, thence to Scottish Freemasons. Another pathway connected Rosicrucianism, linking a resurrected set of books, the Corpus Hermeticum of the second or third century, with the Swiss pioneer of medicine, Paracelsus, thence to Robert Fludd, thence to Francis Bacon.
What I kept coming across was that these streams of thought all seemed to be interconnected, hopping from famous to not-so-famous people, connecting fundamental issues of philosophy and religion, and doing it all with symbols.
For instance, the Egyptian pyramid served as a symbolic connection from ancient pharaohs to the Louvre pyramid in Paris, which, in The Da Vinci Code was imagined as the resting place for the Holy Grail itself. Dan Brown had called attention to the use of the unfinished pyramid on the U.S. dollar bill, and the widely held belief that this signaled the influence of Freemasonry. But further, Dan Brown had made many uses of Egyptian obelisks, calling them “lofty pyramids” because of their pyramidal tops. Such obelisks are found throughout Rome (where they are referenced in the course of Angels & Demons numerous times), but also in other great cities like Paris or London, as Dan Brown noted.
In one fundamental interpretation of the obelisk as a symbol, it represents the connection from God to man, an imitation of a ray of light from heaven shining down on mankind. The light may be a form of energy or power or beneficence, or it may be knowledge and enlightenment. This invites many diverse religions to perceive the obelisk as symbolically appropriate, whether it be Gnostics or Kabbalists or even Christians, even though the obelisk form itself stems from “pagan” sources. Dan Brown many times has reveled in the connections of pagan symbolism to Christian art and architecture.
Back in 2005, as I was writing Secrets of the Widow’s Son (SOWS), I saw this fascination with the symbolism of obelisks as a logical reason why Dan Brown would want to focus on the Washington Monument in TLS . . . and that’s exactly what he did four years later. He even worked with the imagery of the first light from a rising sun touching the aluminum tip of the pyramid on the monument—each day’s first contact with the light of heaven.
Further, I mentioned in SOWS that such an obelisk could be considered as part of a giant sundial, and, in the very first chapter of TLS Dan Brown has Langdon gaze from the plane and remark that it is a “gnomon.” This is the term used for the center piece of a sundial, and it also in Greek can mean “that which reveals.” The Washington Monument is “that which reveals” the secret in TLS.
America’s Occult Heritage
But going beyond symbols to find the really deep foundations of America, it is appropriate to turn to the intellectual heritage brought to us by the great thinkers of Europe, who often held interests in both the emerging scientific tradition and the mystical, occult, and alchemical traditions. Certain historic figures provided connections that we don’t generally hear about.
A good example is Francis Bacon, who studied with the great occult magus Dr. John Dee in the late 1500s. It was probably Dee who instructed him in the gematria of the Kabbalah, and Bacon went on to become a master of codes and ciphers. Bacon had a great interest in the New World and in 1623 wrote a book, New Atlantis, posing a utopia that governed without a king. Dan Brown mentions New Atlantis in TLS as being “the utopian vision on which the American forefathers had allegedly modeled a new world based on ancient knowledge.” (New Atlantis was an influence on Thomas Jefferson’s vision for America.)
It was Bacon who was suspected of being the founder of the Rosicrucians, an elusive movement whose members typically denied being members. Whatever the source, the Rosicrucian manifestos of around 1614 sparked an interest in the bubbling mysteries of hermeticism and the philosopher’s stone. Depending on one’s preferred myth, this could be the secret method to transform lead into gold, or a magic elixir granting life everlasting. It also evokes the phrase, “as above, so below,” which can be construed as marking a spiritual and intellectual pathway connecting man to God.
But alchemists were also experimenters, groping for the systematic study of chemistry and medicine. Bacon wrote about a form of scientific method that was greatly revered by the Royal Society when it was founded in England in the mid-1600s as a kind of club for scientists and great thinkers. Bacon is also imagined by some to be among the first Freemasons.
Later in the seventeenth century, the great mind of Isaac Newton would turn to alchemy and to Rosicrucianism, as well as to mathematics and physics. Newton was for many years president of the Royal Society. Although Newton himself was not known to be a Freemason, a very large number of Royal Society members did join. Thus, Newton stood at the nexus of many currents of thought. One of his other passions was the study of the Bible, and he focused great attention on the Temple of Solomon. The Freemasons incorporated the Temple of Solomon into their myths.
Eventually, one of the greatest American scientists, Benjamin Franklin, would be both a Freemason and a Fellow of the Royal Society. One of the great thinkers of the age, the French philosopher Voltaire actually joined a Freemason lodge together with Franklin and also the Royal Society (of Science) in Paris. Voltaire was a great admirer of Isaac Newton. As famous as he was for his science, Franklin also maintained an interest in alchemy. He was a longtime friend of Joseph Priestley, who stood at the boundary between alchemy and modern chemistry. Priestley was an adviser to Thomas Jefferson, as well as several of the early American patriots. He was also a friend of James Smithson, who would endow the Smithsonian, which plays a significant role in TLS.
Thus, it became apparent that one trail Dan Brown was on was a nontraditional view of American origins that had more to do with the intellectual world of Bacon and ancient Egypt than it did with Pilgrims and traditional views of Christianity. I anticipated in SOWS that Brown would find a way in his next book to make the argument that you could not fully assess the American experience without looking back to Europe and its complex history, especially Freemasonry; Rosicrucianism; mysticism; and scientific, religious, philosophical, and political conceptions that may not always map neatly to what modern-day Americans believe our history to be. I thought Brown would find a story and a plot whose underlying message would be that we are deeply interconnected to one another and to the past in many ways, and that it is a surprising and “strange” past that we are so connected to.
So if you are on a treasure hunt where “It’s all interconnected,” is the watchword, you’ve got a lot of material to mine.
Not only were there endless things to find on the Internet, but there were all kinds of books to buy and borrow. To understand some of Dan Brown’s allusions, you really ought to have a dictionary of symbolism. But why stop at one dictionary? Why not buy three, as I did? And be sure to make one of them the Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Objects. You’ll quickly understand why Dan Brown likes to say, “history is written by the victors.”
For instance, the symbol in TLS called the “circumpunct,” or circle with a dot in its center, is traditionally thought of in a male context, the sign of the (male) sun, or sun god Ra. But the Woman’s Dictionary identifies it as the “primal womb” and says the sun, in some early cultures such as the Hittites, was a goddess.
If you get one book about Freemasonry, you might as well get ten, which soon becomes dozens, since it turns out that for a secret society, the Freemasons have published an awful lot about themselves. Add another five or six about the conspiracies that Freemasons supposedly have hatched and nurtured over the centuries. To make sure you have covered the Mormon connection to Freemasonry, get about five or six books on Joseph Smith and the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Be sure to include a few books on the amazing minds that have at least a footnote in mystical/Rosicrucian/Freemason history, such as Elias Ashmole or René Descartes.
The Dan Brown novel always leads into the world of codes. Once you’re attuned, you discover that practically all the famous men for the last five hundred years wrote in codes to protect their secrets. So it’s a good idea to get some books about the history of codes. There are many fascinating code systems in all of Brown’s books. In TLS Brown uses a well-known Masonic cipher, nicknamed a “pigpen” cipher, and a few relatively easy substitution ciphers. His crowning cipher is the array of symbols on the bottom of the Masonic Pyramid, which he promptly deciphers for his readers. It gathers up a gallery of Greek, alchemical, astrological, and mystic symbols.
And then there’s religion. To see where Dan Brown has been and guess where he might be going, I thought it necessary to get a look at the origins of Christianity and the alternative Bible texts known as the Gnostic Gospels, which he focused on and arguably made into a household word in The Da Vinci Code. But in addition, you have to examine the history of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and dig still deeper, into the Egyptian religions, or Mithraism, or the beliefs of the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians. It’s a good idea to trace the path of Jewish mysticism, including the Kabbalah (whose origins actually may have been Greek, I later found out).
Early on, it may have appeared a bit risky for me to devote a considerable amount of SOWS to a discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of the occult, hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and the Kabbalah, but these turned out to be core building blocks in the architecture of TLS.
Following Dan Brown’s Intellectual Footsteps and Predicting Where They Would Lead Him
From actually visiting Dan Brown’s hometown and the schools he attended, I got a sense of a general openness to these very esoteric currents of thought. Brown is the eldest child of Richard Brown, a mathematics professor at the prestigious Exeter Academy. Brown’s father authored geometry textbooks, so it is perhaps no surprise that Dan Brown would eventually develop an interest in the mystical nature of geometry so central to Freemasonry. Richard Brown was also a choir director at the Episcopal church and his wife, Connie, was the organist there, so again, it is no surprise Brown would be interested in the esoterica of music as codes, Mozart as a Freemason, etc. Dan Brown attended church and sang in the choir. He could have stuck to this single religious tradition, but it was a time when Exeter Academy itself was in flux about religion. Around the time that Dan Brown was a student there in the early 1980s, Exeter had begun allowing students to treat religious services as voluntary rather than mandatory. The school’s Congregational chapel began to host diverse religious groups—Quakers, Jews, and Buddhists, as well as many different Christian strains.
What I learned at Exeter Academy was that Dan Brown was not a standout as a student, and wasn’t thought of as a particularly creative person, whether it was music or writing, although he had a hand in both pursuits. But the rigors of Exeter Academy, and especially its focus on writing skills, did prepare students for distinction, if they seized the opportunity. There was a stream of Exeter alumni such as Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, and John Irving who were famous authors and gave provocative lectures when they returned to visit the school. (Think of the scene in TLS chapter 111, when Langdon recalls Peter Solomon giving an eye-opening lecture on the Smithsonian, the Founding Fathers, and religion to Exeter students.)
Later, at Amherst College, Brown studied English and Spanish, sang in the glee club, and played squash. He found himself in classes with some major young stars, including the brilliant David Foster Wallace, and thus Brown was not considered a standout. He didn’t stand out in the glee club either. Nonetheless, after graduating from Amherst in 1986, Brown pursued a music career for about six or seven years, even moving to Los Angeles and producing a studio album. This was where he met Blythe, who would become his wife and later on, his muse, his portal to mystical thought, and his most valuable research partner.
Blythe and Dan were vacationing in Tahiti in 1993 when he picked up a book by Sidney Sheldon and concluded that writing an action novel was within his grasp. It would take several years to reinvent himself, and the first efforts were not stellar successes, but soon Dan Brown the musician had been shed like an old skin, and Dan Brown the novelist had appeared. It was a transformation.
A central theme in TLS is the hermetic concept of transformation, which can be interpreted in several ways. Mal’akh strives to conflate all of them, whether it be physical transformation such as tattooing his entire body or castrating himself, or spiritual transformation, in the twisted expectation of being able to rise to a godlike plane of existence. Mal’akh has several chameleonlike physical changes as well, when he morphs from Zachary Solomon, to Andros Dareios, to Christopher Abaddon, then to Mal’akh.
In SOWS, I covered alchemical and hermetic transformation. I also devoted an appendix to the concept of death and resurrection, using mainly George Washington’s deathbed scene, but also mentioning other contexts, including hermetics. A simulation of death and rebirth is at the heart of Freemasonry’s central rituals. This became a major theme in TLS. Not only was Mal’akh hoping for a kind of rebirth, but also Robert Langdon was subjected to a deathlike experience in the liquid breathing chamber, then brought back to life.
A number of my investigations didn’t pay off in directly obvious ways. In anticipation of TLS, I read a great deal about the men who founded America. I read biographies of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and various articles on George Mason, Paul Revere, Thomas Paine, and others. I was especially interested in the known Freemasons—Washington, Franklin, Revere—and anticipated that there might be plotlines that emerged from some of the less well-known features of their biographies. However, almost none of these were mentioned in TLS in any aspect significant to the plot. Yet it is clear from Dan Brown’s interviews that he had the Founding Fathers in mind, particularly with respect to their common belief in deism. “America was not founded as a Christian nation, but became a Christian nation,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer in a recent interview.
Because of certain links between Freemasonry and the Mormons, I delved deeply into the legend of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Dan Brown only mentioned Smith in passing, even though Brown was seen in 2006 on a research trip to the home of the Mormon church, Salt Lake City, Utah. Some commenters have said they detect aspects of Mormon theology in TLS, but it is not an obvious feature of the book.
While there is plenty of focus on Freemasonry in TLS, one of the big surprises, for me, was that Dan Brown almost ignored the role of Freemasonry in the founding of the United States, the period surrounding the Revolution. While some have claimed it was a hydra-headed conspiracy to control the new nation and every institution in it, the real truth was that Freemasons were just one important part of the mix of influences. But TLS doesn’t even take on this debate. The depiction in TLS of the 33° ritual at the opening of the book and on the MacGuffin of the videotape as a congregation of powerful government leaders is the only tangible evidence suggesting anything remotely conspiratorial about Freemasons. Like so many before him
, Dan Brown could only point to this as somehow incriminating. The missing piece of the puzzle is, what are those people conspiring to do?
In Secrets of the Widow’s Son, I think I accurately, fairly, and objectively portrayed the Freemasons. They have their interesting and complicated history, they really did have members who were prominent, in America and elsewhere—all those presidents, signers of the Declaration of Independence, astronauts, scientists, musicians—and they have endured centuries of accusations about their supposed conspiracies. With some small exceptions, I think in TLS Dan Brown very closely aligned with my views.
Some have already accused Dan Brown of being intimidated and co-opted by the Freemasons, but I just think he followed his own path. It appears he honestly respects the Freemasonic principles of brotherhood, equality, and religious tolerance. Also, as we have seen before in his prior novels, he always leaves an escape valve in his plot mechanism so that the larger institution, whether it be the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, or the Freemasons, can be excused. It has been more Dan Brown’s style to create a rogue character and situate him within an organization so that he can misuse his position. Mal’akh was such a character, but more apparently an impostor (from page 1). This was somewhat different from the camerlengo in A&D or Leigh Teabing in DVC, who were carefully concealed as villains until the end.
I reported on the many conspiracy theories that stem from interpretations of the street layout of Washington, including the famous satanic inverted pentagram, and other symbols, often seen as signifying that Freemasonry was in control of the layout. I treated these theories with skepticism. Freemasons were certainly prominent in designing Washington and many of its key buildings. They often used good solid engineering and architectural principles that emphasized the principles of geometry, light, and alignment with nature they may have learned in Masonic lodges. But to argue that Masons were secretly trying to invoke a devil-worshipping agenda in the layout of the streets of Washington is, on its face, absurd. In TLS, Dan Brown’s treatment of this issue was almost identical to mine in SOWS.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 34
